Bob's trademark white cap became a beacon to attract spectators - Keith Arthur

Bob Nudd MBE came to match fishing quite late in life, but it didn’t take him long to reach the very top. 

The quietly-spoken man from deepest Essex was the first Southerner to be picked by Dick Clegg for England’s World Championship squad. I’ll never forget sitting next to Dick on the way back from the Killyhevlin section of Lough Erne on the ill-fated 1985 Sealink Classic, telling him he’d picked the wrong man for the 1984 Championships and how Steve Gardener or Dave Vincent would have been better bets. This was despite the fact that in 1983 Bob was part of an Essex County team that won the World Club Championship in Italy – and that sort of thing doesn’t happen often. Shows what I know!

Bob soon became an integral member of a great squad and in 1990 won the first of four World Championship individual gold medals. His trademark white cap became a beacon to attract spectators and there was always a big gallery behind his zone. 

The highlight of his England career was winning double gold, team and individual, at Nottingham’s Holme Pierrepont rowing course in 1994. Although Bob’s forte is pole fishing, I was there to witness his skills with a long-range slider float.

The highlight of his England career was winning double gold, team and individual, at Nottingham’s Holme Pierrepont rowing course in 1994.

I was also there for Bob’s final individual win in 1999 on a roasting-hot canal in Toledo, Spain. The wait for the final Spanish angler to weigh in on Bob’s section was one of the tensest moments in angling I’ve ever known.

Bob still competes at the highest open match level, preferring the natural waters of the Fens near his home, and is now back in the England fold at ‘veteran’ (a term he despises! level, so his hoard of gold may not yet be complete.

Always happy to talk to the crowds, and free with his advice and knowledge, Bob is a legend, and his impact on the sport will endure for many years to come. 

His England team mates applaud Bob’s victory.

For more fishing history, pick up Angling Times magazine every Tuesday and turn to Arthur’s Archive

Billy Lane, the wizard of floatfishing - Keith Arthur

The great Billy Lane never won the National, but he came close. When cash prizes were secondary to silverware, nobody had a trophy cabinet as well stocked as his.

Then in 1963 he became England’s first World Champ and that enhanced his reputation still more. There were no such things as feeders or catapults allowed, and Billy’s floatfishing skills made legering redundant.

Nobody had a trophy cabinet as well stocked as Billy Lane

The Missile – a huge loaded, bodied waggler, around long before the term waggler had been coined – helped anglers to fish the wide, deep, waters of the Fens, but the first of his inventions that I adopted was the Trent Trotter. Billy designed this float for very shallow areas of the river. It was basically an Avon float with the stem chopped off directly below the body. An eye was whipped on and the float was fished bottom only, with a bulk shot locking it in place, one No4 shot set at half-depth below the float and another set at double the depth ABOVE the float.

This was what we now call a back shot, and it dragged bottom, slowing the float down. On some Middle Thames winter roach swims, only 2ft deep, it was particularly deadly.

His seminal work on the subject, the Billy Lane Encyclopaedia of Float Fishing, was published in the 1970s and remains a go-to read.

His tackle shop in Coventry is still a haven for anglers, and the maggot farm he set up produces some of the finest bait in the country. Keeping the Lane tradition of winning big matches going, his grandson Tom famously won the 2015 RiverFest title on the River Wye in conditions that even the great man may have struggled to find a float for. Tom’s 4oz feeder did the trick and enabled a second-day performance that was more than enough to clinch the title.

Billy Lane in his shop

To read more fascinating fishing history, pick up Angling Times every Tuesday and turn to Arthur’s Archive

The barbel records of the 1960s - Keith Arthur

While not quite ten-a-penny, it is fair to say that 16lb barbel turn very few heads these days. Sixty years ago it was very different. 

The record – or, rather, records as there were three matching fish – was 14lb 6oz, and hadn’t been beaten since the first of this trio was captured from Molesey Weir on the Thames in Victorian times, only equalled. 

When the late Colonel Crow announced in 1960 that a salmon angler, a Mr Cassell, had taken a 16lb 1oz barbel from The Bridge Pool at Ibsley, on the Hampshire Avon, the news turned a lot of heads. 

16lb 1oz Hampshire Avon barbel

Remember that back in the 1960s the Avon was still largely a salmon river with some beats exclusively reserved for salmon anglers until their season ended in, I think, October. 

The most famous stretch, the Royalty, could be fished for coarse fish alongside salmon anglers but the best pools, such as the Parlour, were priced in a way that deterred maggot-drowners. Maggots were even banned there for quite a time. 

The Royalty was the haunt of the great specimen anglers of their day. FWK Wallis was one of those barbel record-holders who caught his 14-pounder from the Royalty in 1937. He invented the ‘Wallis Cast’ for the centrepin, where the line between reel and butt ring was pulled as the float was cast to make the reel spin. 

Using that technique, and suitably large floats, he was able to cast to the far bank of the Avon, probably using the Wallis Wizard rod. 

I recall my fishing buddy at the time bought one. It was 11ft long, with a whole cane butt section and split-cane middle and tip. The cork handle was short, making it easier to use the eponymous cast. 

I fished the Royalty a few times in the 1960s...when maggots were allowed...and what a stretch of river it was then, and still is now. 

What a stretch of river the Royalty still is

"There were so many roach you could have used them as a bridge to cross the river" - Keith Arthur

When Pete Burrell amassed 259lb-plus of roach during a match on the famous Sillees River, the weight beggared belief. In a five-hour match on this small river, part of the enormous Erne system, Pete caught 942 roach – yes, he counted them – at one stage catching 12 fish a minute!

Pete fished line-to-hand in a performance that took not only great strength and concentration but also wonderful technique. Every fish has to be caught and unhooked efficiently, rebaiting only when essential as even a couple of dead skins would be seized by ravenous redfins.

The Sillees is one of the waters flowing into the Erne that attracts spawning aggregations of roach and back in those days there were a lot of them! I was taken there one evening by the late Pete Ottewill, who knew as much about fishing the border counties between Ireland and Northern Ireland as anyone.

He took me to meet Oliver, a farmer, who explained that when the main run of roach swam to the stone weir by his farm, their numbers were sufficient to raise the water level enough to swim over the weir!

I fished for an hour that evening and had 42lb of roach. Bizarrely, the swim Burrell famously fished was occupied by a pike angler, livebaiting with a roach! Sadly, on the match the following day, three years after the Burrell catch, I drew too far downstream, away from the fish. I had 50lb in my net after 90 minutes before the bites dried up as the shoal swam through and I weighed in 72lb and won the section. 

How ironic then that the Sillees was cursed by the medieval St Faber, making it “poor for fishing, good for drowning”. If Pete had fallen in on the saint’s day, I’m pretty sure he could have walked out on the backs of the roach. 

Pete Burrell 259lb roach catch

“Their numbers were sufficient to raise the water level enough to swim over the weir!”

For more fishing history, pick up Angling Times every Tuesday and turn to Arthur’s Archive…

The first-ever carp broadcast, 1953 - Keith Arthur

These days, if a TV company said to a carp angler: “We need you to catch a fish live for our cameras” it would seem nigh-on impossible to fail.

Go back 60 or more years and it would be a very different tale. Then, carp were unbelievably scarce and considered by the average angler to be virtually uncatchable anyway. 

None of that deterred the great Richard (Dick) Walker when the BBC said that they wanted to broadcast a carp being caught on the first night of the 1953 season… live for the radio!

No such thing as portable equipment was available then. Instead, it was a ‘radio car’ with microphones hard-wired to the swim, along with a presenter and Bernard Venables – one of the co-founders of Angling Times – as commentator. 

Carp bait in those days was normally a chunk of boiled potato, which was considered too big for anything else to eat. And do you know what? Walker only went and did it, landing a 16lb fish – which would have been the equivalent of at least a mid-thirty now.  

This was June 1953, the year after Walker had smashed the carp record with the 44lb fish that became known as Clarissa. 

Dick Walker, as an engineer, developed rods for carp fishing; there were none before his time. Split cane salmon rods were about all the carper could hope for, but Walker developed specific (compound) tapers for the job in hand. 

He also invented the test curve principle, measuring the amount of force needed to bend the rod through 90 degrees. From that, the correct breaking strain of line could be calculated. Nowadays this is all done by computer-aided design technology. 

Similarly, the recording of the broadcast could all be done these days on a mobile phone...only with video, too. As for catching a 16lb carp...no serious carper worth his salt would bother with fish so small. You’d be better off asking a match angler to catch one on his pole!

Have the Thames floods moved the fish? - Keith Arthur

Having read many opinions about fish being washed to sea by floods – not something I subscribe to – I wonder if the current heavy flows in my local River Thames will result in the rejuvenation of sport in the ‘full tidal’, by which I mean from Richmond Lock into London.

Aside from one or two fairly isolated bags of big bream at the very start of this season, it has to be said that fishing has been poor, and has been worse each year at the annual TideFest match. 

The last proper spell of very high water the Thames had was in 2014, and sport at Kew, Barnes and Putney was brilliant in 2015. It didn’t deteriorate above Richmond Lock... except perhaps there were fewer big bream. They were, however, quite prolific further down. It may be nothing more than a coincidence, but we won’t find out for sure until June. 

The full tidal was once a brilliant dace fishery too, but in recent years it has become more mixed, with roach far more in evidence and chub appearing, unheard of 15 years ago. That may be following the clean-up of Mogden Sewage Treatment works that, in times of reasonably heavy rain, would discharge untreated sewage into the river in an area that immature dace used as a haven. Since modernisation, only heavily diluted sewage is discharged. 

Even that isn’t desirable. The raw stuff, in far smaller quantities, still pours in at Hammersmith – but it’s a massive improvement. 

Once the Tideway Tunnel is operational all that will cease. What a river we’ll have then! 

It will never be open season on otters - Keith Arthur

While I have enormous sympathy for those whose businesses have been impacted by the increase in otter numbers, and applaud their new initiative, I fear the Fish Protection Bureau will fail.

The group’s leader, eminent carp farmer Mark Simmonds, mentions ‘farmers’ rights’ to protect stocks, probably referring to the myth that dogs attacking sheep can be shot or injured. That isn’t the case. Farmers injuring dogs are responsible for that dog’s injuries by law, even if the dog was loose and trespassing. Of course, a court may look on individual cases sympathetically, but the dog’s owner could sue. Equally, dog owners bear the responsibility for their animals’ actions and could well be forced to pay compensation for any losses.

The main difference between dogs and otters is that dogs aren’t wild. Foxes are and, of course, farmers can and would be expected to take lethal action against them. However, foxes are not protected to the same level otters are - the highest form of protection available - because they are not and never have been critically endangered. And remember fish farmers can’t shoot cormorants or goosander without a license for a given number of birds.

The best tactic, in my opinion, is to get real expert advice - and that costs money and takes time - on actual numbers of otters in specific areas and prove that there are too many for the otters’ own good.

What has to be remembered, however, is that most of the businesses and fish being affected worst didn’t exist when otters were added to the protected list of species in 1981 and they had been in serious decline for many years before that. As with cormorants and many other species, protection can be too effective.

But please, as an angler, don’t campaign for otters to die and zander to live. That’s hypocrisy of the highest order.

Will the Trent measure up to a RiverFest final? - Keith Arthur

RiverFest has a new venue for the final following two years on the Severn beset by bad conditions. It has been unlucky but Shrewsbury is one of those sections where fish either are or not...and if they're not it’s going to be tough. It seems like conditions leading up to the event, even from much earlier in the year, need to be conducive to good sport.

I don’t quite understand why the Wye has been avoided again...unless it’s a question of over using the section. There are festivals, opens, leagues and all sorts on a relatively short stretch - again where huge shoals of fish migrate to – in a fairly brief timescale.

The River Trent is an interesting choice for an Autumn event. As a lowland river it is effected worse by extra water than the Wye and Severn which are both spate rivers and can be shocking if there’s no rain, clear skies and a couple of air frosts so it’s a brave choice.

It does have the advantage of a wide range of species to fish for and with chub seemingly making a comeback to add to the roach, dace, silver bream and perch potential it could be a great selection. I’ll keep my fingers crossed as the Trent has always been my favourite match river.

Mum holds the key to get more kids fishing - Keith Arthur

No one can argue that carp angling is the prime mover behind most of the tackle industry in this country yet it’s a pretty difficult area for women, especially those with families.

Hopefully having the ultimate target – World Champion is pretty serious on any level – to aim at will encourage more women to get involved.

It’s no secret that the Angling Trust’s participation features Family Fishing as its primary means of introducing new anglers. It is very aware that it’s all very well targeting schoolchildren but it has to be borne in mind that anyone still at primary school needs someone to take them to the bank and supply them with tackle. Therefore good old Mum is the answer.

Although there are notable exceptions, most clubs have no facilities or even suitable waters for juniors and there are plenty of fisheries that either don’t or won’t cater for them either. Mum holds the key. Now there is even more incentive for Mums to become active within the sport rather than passive observers.

New record barbel may be related to 1970s Ouse stocks - Keith Arthur

That new record barbel snuck in under the radar didn’t it! Despite many predicting the old Great Ouse fish would be dethroned, I shouldn’t think many would have guessed the new title holder would have come from a ‘southern river’ in which barbel are not indigenous!

Some were introduced by the National Rivers Authority, predecessors of the Environment Agency, in the late 1960s/early 1970s when they were stocked - or re-stocked in many rivers where they’d either disappeared or never been.

Who knows, it may have been related to the Great Ouse specimens responsible for basically re-writing the record books.

I believe fish live for far longer than the years they are attributed with: big bream in the Thames for example. I’m certain the ever decreasing numbers of bream in the lower and tidal river were spawned in the very early 1970s. If I find another dead spawning casualty washed up by the tide in spring I may remove a scale or two and get an estimate from someone with a microscope.